Video and Film Screening and Q&A
Fringe London – 207 King Street
Friday February 2, 2018 7:30pm EST

Screening Program
English for Beginners, 2009, 2:32 min, video
Rhizomatic Directed Simulation, 2014, 6 min, 16mm
Rayado en Queer, 2014, 1:43 min, video
Bridge of the Americas, 2015, 2:30 min, video
Casiteros, 201, 1 min
Conchitas/ Conchs (with Jorge Lozano), 2010, 5:50 min, video
Estera (Mat), 3:43 m, Dual screen super 8mm
San Rafael, 2010, 4:20 min, video
Borders/ Bordes, 2010, 3 min, video
Walking in circles,2015, 3:54. Super 8 mm film. 5.1 Surround sound.
One Dollar Click, 2009, 2 min, video
How to make a beach (for a perfect suntan) (with Jorge Lozano), 2017, 4 min, video
La Casa de Olga/The House of Olga, 2010, 6:18 min, video
The island, 2018, super, 5 min, 8mm film hand processed

Notes on the Screening
English for Beginners—The beginning, the first border crossing, the first video made after the artist’s move to Canada. Language, country, identity. It is composed in three frames, an echo of the Canadian flag. The speaking face is also divided, cut in half by the landscape that pours into the new wound of identity. (Mike Hoolboom)

Rhizomatic Directed Simulation—The movie opens with a quote from Borges: “The best imitation consists of the original’s destruction and the creation of a self referential text.” While a galaxy of Super 8 luxuries erupt, the film hand processed, the emulsion cracked in order to reveal its silver secrets, a silhouetted camera operator attempts to contain the experience, even as he is subjected to the same chemical disintegrations. (Mike Hoolboom)

Rayado en Queer—A remix of the previous movie (a famous American Super 8 movie from the 70s, scratched up by the artist), this time narrating the body. Fleeting texts conjure a space between genders that creates poetry out of theory: ” …the materialization of the political … increasing the level of testosterone… different than a cis-female.” The quotes are drawn from Paul Preciado’s devastating theory confessional Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. (Mike Hoolboom)

Bridge of the Americas—Part of an ongoing series of works made in Panama. Live animations re-animate this international bridge and border. The persistent background of life in the Panama Canal Zone are these passing ships crammed with waving travellers, the most temporary of citizens, their eyes like rain. (Mike Hoolboom)

Casiteros—The body as an immanent part of the landscape. About tenderness and innocence. Two Channel Video Installation. Casiteros is an observational video introducing Pachito and his kitten. They both live in a disadvantaged neighborhood called El Bosque (The Woods) in Cartagena, Colombia. In Pachitos house, there are approximately 150 roosters bred for cockfighting that sing in unison each morning. The work deals with tenderness, vulnerability, and innocence and hidden traumas

Conchitas/ Conchs—Double screen movie about composition, memory and drowning. Like so many of this artist’s movies, these pictures are gathered as part of her living, collected with her reliable camera accompaniment. Alexandra becomes the beach sand while Jorge dissolves the picture into a gummy bear colour screen, as we hear memories of drowning on the soundtrack, the casual terror lurking in the light of the everyday. (Mike Hoolboom)

Estera (Mat)—As part of my investigation on the use of weeds for medicinal purposes I asked Alejandro a traditional mat maker in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia) to make one using weeds. These plants are commonly used to shield children from wicked witches – the Mohana’s kidnappings, bad eye and other forms of evil spirits. The film registers the making of the mat and the activities going on around its making.

San Rafael—Made in a single shot from a chance laundromat encounter. The black eye of desire. Rafael offers a reaction shot to his street cruising efforts, and the unwanted fight that ensued. In his extravagant speaking he names himself as an archangel, his chest open so that the wings of his words can lift every ordinary encounter into a queer sublime. (Mike Hoolboom)

Borders/ Bordes—A masterpiece of multi-screen bodily decomposition, Borders offers a nine-screen collective portrait, made entirely out of photographs. Inviting six of her queer feminist housemates who identified as women for a suite of portrait sessions, the artist pictures the borders of skin, and by recombining them into a grid creates an always shifting composite body that floats between genders. The soundtrack is created out of the spaces between words, the beginnings of sentences, the pauses and hesitations, where the unconscious lives. (Mike Hoolboom)

Walking in circles—Experimental documentary based on the circles at York University Strike 2015.

One Dollar Click—The artist makes an approach to the indigenous triumph of the Kuna on the San Blas Islands, a string of 365 islands that run between Colombia and Panama. Nearly every frame has come from a still camera, as we are led across sand and water into village life. The artist appears as an animated apparition, portraits, posters and landscapes float through her. The feeling of the land, the roots of collective experience and identity. A passing banner announces: “People who lose their tradition, lose their place.” (Mike Hoolboom)

How to make a beach (for a perfect suntan)—It is an intervention that deals with the disorientation of feeling lost at odds with one’s immediate transformation of the environment. And the orientation, or being pointed toward a distant and disruptive possibility.

La Casa de Olga/The House of Olga—In the most direct frames possible the movie brings us into an intimate encounter with Olga, elegant and proud, thoughtfully articulate. How happy she is that Alexandra has come at last to see her house, which she shows off with all the grace of an estate holder. She points to the rock which was her bed for many years, and which cured her of every physical ailment. Her home used to be part of the old monastery in Panama City called Ruins of the Society of Jesus, but the walls and ceilings were blown away, she lives now in the former interior, exposed to every element, taking shelter occasionally beneath her yellow umbrella, her scant belongings placed in the cracks of a wall. (Mike Hoolboom)